Puerto Rico’s fertile land is a crop and pesticide poison test site for Monsanto, which was recently sold to Bayer chemical company. Many locals near the company’s seed sites complain of illness. Monsanto/ Bayer has $2 billion in court judgements against it for cancer and injury claims, with 13,000 more US cases pending. Other GMO and chemical companies in the area include Syngenta, BASF, Pioneer and RiceTec. Ricardo Rossello, the Governor of Puerto Rico, blamed the island’s bad economy on “colonial treatment” and said that tax breaks are the only tool for economic development. He said that the transnational companies account for 42% to 46% of the economy, although Monsanto/ Bayer receives a 90% tax exemption and $3 million in wage subsidies.

There is a reason why Puerto Rico has to import 85% of its food. I wonder if the Puerto Rican official who was interviewed really understands this. When the “economic development” is impoverishing your colony and poisoning your people, might you conclude the colony would be better off without it? Most likely only bribery could get local officials to approve borrowing that the colony cannot afford.

Here is the link to my previous post, The IMF and World Bank: Partners In Backwardness, about the economic war that countries like the USA are waging on places like Puerto Rico. Since Puerto Rico is “only” a colony of the USA, our oligarchs feel free to treat it like any other enslaved country.

The factory farms in the continental USA have a different role to play in the scheme of the oligarchs. These farms are part of the oligarchs’ plan to feed the rest of the world in order to control the rest of the world. There is no threat more powerful than withholding food. That is how places like Puerto Rico are encouraged to take on debt to produce exports rather than feed their own people, and stay out of debt.